


An Unyielding Heart

by Merkwerkee



Series: Being Bruno Hamilton [42]
Category: Masters of the Metaverse (Web Series)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, dude got boiled alive, just a warning, s6 e12: Consequences
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-28
Updated: 2020-03-28
Packaged: 2021-03-01 00:06:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,628
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23355928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merkwerkee/pseuds/Merkwerkee
Summary: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. For every step forward, the path ahead must be assessed for correctness. For every failure, there are consequences.
Series: Being Bruno Hamilton [42]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1643020





	An Unyielding Heart

Joe’s Diner was pleasantly cool after the oppressive heat of both Arena and the barren wasteland where he’d been sent to fight.

Bruno sipped quietly at a beer - a Heineken, though he hadn’t specified such when he’d asked for one. Hollywood had simply brought it to the table with Crash and Andi’s milkshakes - and a glass of water for the still-unconscious Wells propped up in the corner of their booth - and bustled off before Bruno could question him on it. How Hollywood knew each person’s food preferences would have to remain a mystery, it seemed. Neither Andi nor Crash had seemed too concerned about it, and both seemed to be enjoying their milkshakes, so he had to be content to let it go for now.

Andi was doing most of the talking, with Crash nodding at various points but not contributing much to the overall conversation; from Bruno’s point of view he seemed almost distracted, mind clearly on something other than the subject at hand. He wasn’t sure if Andi had noticed Crash’s preoccupation and didn’t care to mention it or had simply not noticed; either way, she carried most of the burden of conversation.

Bruno had to wonder what Crash was thinking about. He’d asked - nearly demanded - a debriefing from the younger man, and a fuller outline of the situation; what duties did they have as Prime pilots? What did he mean ancestral meeting place? Where had the boxes really come from during the fight? Why were the Trinity the first? What did he mean when he said that Bruno was a Class 4?

Crash had promised to answer them once they got back to the base so he could answer everyone’s questions at once, and Bruno had to be content with that. It was logical to wait, and make sure everyone got all of the information at the same time, but he was - somewhat ironically, given his previous line of work - tired of secrets. Secrets in general, but ones pertaining to or kept by Jaxuns in very much particular, and he had the slightly nagging feeling that if he let it get pushed off for too long he’d never get his answers.

Hollywood came back with their food, and Bruno was surprised to see him put another bottle down with his plate. He glanced down at the bottle in his hand and found it nearly empty; strangely, he couldn’t feel the warmth that usually came with the first bottle, no ease in his shoulders or the muscles of his back. It was strange enough that he sniffed the second bottle when he opened it to verify that it did, in fact, contain alcohol - with a seven-foot-tall lizard man drinking what looked like sriracha two tables over, he wouldn’t put it past Hollywood to have served him something that tasted like Heineken but was not actually beer - but the whiff of chemical fumes was familiar enough. He shrugged mentally and handed his empty to Hollywood, who whisked it away and headed towards a table that looked to be getting ready to leave.

The food’s arrival seemed to break through whatever the Trinity had done to Wells - Crash had been obtuse on the subject, though whether that had been on purpose or Bruno simply lacking the necessary context for his statements, Bruno couldn’t be sure - and he roused as his plate was set in front of him. He blinked as he looked around in bewilderment, eyes sharpening quickly. “How the hell did I end up in Joe’s?” He demanded of the table at large, and both Andi and Crash started at once trying to fill him in on recent events.

Bruno decided that discretion was the better part of valor and slipped from the booth as they sorted themselves out of the resulting conversational tangle. He’d only had a bottle - and a half - of beer, but it had been a few hours since they’d left the home metaverse. A glance and a mouthed question at Hollywood netted him a nod towards the hallway that they’d once taken to get to Arena to fight a warlord. There was no sign of that door in the hall now, but Bruno didn’t really expect to see it. Fortunately the door he wanted was labeled neatly and clearly: BATHROOM.

Pushing his way inside, he found a clean, white-tiled room with plain white fixtures and a stainless steel faucet. It didn’t take him long to do his business, but as he was washing his hand a glint of light caught his eye. Peeking out from under his sleeve was the wrist band of the control braces he’d pulled out of the strange, silvery box that had fallen from someplace further away from the sky. The metal glistened in the bright light of the bathroom and Bruno had to resist the urge to roll his sleeves up to see all of them. So that _everyone_ could see all of them. 

Not that the bracers were much to look at; these were slimmer than the bulky, ornate bracers his avatar had used and favored, the fit comfortable and close beneath Bruno’s preferred style of shirt and the bands of it lacking in the ornate runes and obfuscating mechanisms his avatar had preferred. One wider band fit around Bruno’s arm just below the elbow and connected to a second band that rested around his wrist by thin, flexible rods that did not chafe as his previous experience with such devices had, and a small circle of a metallic concentrator in his palm that hooked to the wrist band by wires and which did not impede his grip on his guns (he’d checked).

Bruno clenched his left hand around the power concentrator and breathed through the urge. Lothar Kaldegga, a previous avatar, was the one who’d given Bruno access to elemental magic in the first place; he had been a bitter oilslick of a man addicted to power and the wielding of it. And every time Bruno accessed his power, a little bit of that mire bled in with it. 

Bruno had _boiled a man alive_ because he’d needed to end the fight quickly after using Kaldegga’s earth powers, not three hours ago. He had concentrated heat into his opponent - who had looked and acted so like the General - until the man had cooked from the inside out. He had killed so very many people in a wide variety of ways with a frankly astonishing array of weapons over his long career; this _should have_ been no different.

But this time, something inside him had _enjoyed_ it.

Bruno splashed his face with water as the memory coiled in his head like a viper. It had been a brief flicker as he’d watched his opponent’s eyes pop in their sockets and steam boil away from the other man’s mouth, just briefest thrill at the power unleashed from the palms of his hands mixed with an odd pleasure in the agony and death it caused, but even the memory of it made him want to take an icepick and remove Kaldegga from his head by force. 

Bruno had never been the kind of man to enjoy suffering - not his, not anyone else’s. He’d take the hits because he _could_ , better than anyone else, and he’d do what was _necessary_ only for as long as it was, in fact, necessary. He’d told the McPhernon kid once that he’d never broken the Geneva Convention in his work; he refused to become the man that broke with with glee. Kaldegga had been an object lesson, one that Bruno would not forget easily; for all that the powers granted to Kaldegga - and, by extension, Bruno - made it easy, he refused to become that man or forget what he’d done.

As much as he wished he could yank Kaldegga out of his soul by the roots.

The thought had a hand going instinctively to his chest as the phantom sensation of broken ribs and punctured organs flared in a brief moment of remembered agony. Worse still was the sensation of the _void_ that accompanied it, the memory of an empty space where an avatar was supposed to be and the straining effort to push a dead body into moving when its life had fled. 

Richard Ramsbottom was not an avatar Bruno would forget in a hurry. The less Bruno had to think about the man’s affections, the better, but the fact remained that Bruno had failed him more comprehensively than he’d failed anyone in years. Bruno still wasn’t quite sure how the whole pilot/avatar thing worked, but Rhodes had been quite clear about the laws regarding killing avatars and he hadn’t specified whether he meant your own or others. 

Beyond even that, Ramsbottom had been just as much a member of the team as Andi or Bruno himself, and he had let the man _die_. However temporary that death had proved, no matter that Bruno had been pushed to the back of their shared psyche at the time, Ramsbottom’s safety was a mission priority and Bruno had gotten him killed.

Bruno didn’t fail often, but when he did he didn’t wince away from it. Ramsbottom had died, and Bruno would accept the consequences of that. Kaldegga’s influence became more apparent - and abhorrent - as Bruno used his powers, and Bruno would have to keep a sharp on himself when he used those powers in the future. Ramsbottom’s interpersonal activities…Bruno splashed his face with water and dried off with the nearby towel. The less he had to deal with interpersonal activities, the better. 

With a deep breath and a reinforced sense of determination, Bruno headed back out into the noise of the Diner proper and rejoined the other three. 

He would not fail again.


End file.
